Airline English

Feb 12, 2007

I’m spending an almost uninterrupted month on the road this February.
I’ve just come from London to Seattle, after which I’ll be in Reston,
VA.

With all this moving about naturally comes a whole lot of air travel.
I’ve started to notice what has become, to me at least, a disturbing
pattern in the speech of the employees of the airline industry. I’ve
been interested in the way speech evolves in tight social groups for a
while now, so this is awakening the armchair linguist in me.

If you’ve done much air travel, the sound of this may be familiar to
you:

“Welcome to Seattle, Washington. The current time is 7:05PM. We do
hope you had an enjoyable flight with us and that if you do have
airline needs in the future that you do choose **Air again. We do
know that you have a choice when choosing an airline, and we do thank
you for your business. Do be careful when opening the overhead
compartments as contents do shift during travel and do sometimes
fall on the heads of unsuspecting passengers. We do hope you do have
a nice day.”

(Emphasis NOT mine).

It’s as if the airlines have evolved their own little English, which
favors the verb “do”. It seems that, somehow, the airline employees have
been taught that inefficient over-use of the word “do” makes for more
“official” sounding language.

Or maybe there’s actually a game being played by the pilots and flight
attendants. Every time you say “do” you get a point. You collect them
like air miles and get awarded “elite”, “silver”, “gold”, or “platinum”
flight attendant status at the end of the year, which you can cash in
for the right to serve the first class cabins instead of having to deal
with us riff-raff back in coach.

Maybe it’s not an accident at all. Maybe some brilliant scientist
somewhere has determined that using speech like this helps people who
don’t speak English as their native language. I hope that’s not the
case, though. It’s more fun to think of it as an accident. Given the
fact that it happens even in the more casual speech of the pilots, in
between talking about how we’ll enjoy the weather on the ground in
Cancun and filling us in on the latest football scores, I’d bet it’s not
intentional.

Can you think of any other industry groups (other than us IT people) who
have evolved their own language quirks?